In The Fabric of Civilization, author Virginia Postrel does a thorough job of documenting how textiles truly have been the fabric of civilization, in so many different ways. One aspect of the book that caught my attention was the discussion about silk. Who doesn’t love the feel of silk against the skin? The woven kind, not those sticky cocoons the silkworms build. Let’s have just a brief bit of history here from Postrel’s book before we take a peek at the potential future of silk in a high-tech world.

Postrel explains that “sericulture” is the ancient art of raising and harvesting of silkworms. She notes that silk proteins have been found under bodies in Chinese tombs 8,500 years old, suggesting these bodies were wrapped or dressed in silk even way back then. Most likely, these fabrics were created from wild silk, but a few thousand years later, the Chinese were actually cultivating silkworms to gain more silk filaments (the oldest actual silk fabrics date back about 5,500 year, according to Postrel).

Silkworms were “domesticated,” if that’s the right word. I mean, we usually think about dogs or horses or chickens when we think about domesticated animals, and a silkworm probably wouldn’t be the best kind of cuddly pet. Anyway, when silkworms hatched from eggs, they were placed in trays full of chopped up mulberry leaves and ate their little hearts out until it was time to spin a nice silky cocoon. These cocoons were kept under close observation, and heated to kill the moth inside before it could break out of its silky prison and destroy the fibers the worm worked so hard to create. It truly was an art that required close observation of time, temperature, humidity, and, of course, those yummy mulberry leaves.